We have been purging our books. No easy task, we read voraciously and widely and have for decades. One advantage of going through the shelves slowly is I find books I have forgotten about. For example: Tristan Tzara’s “First Poems” translated from the Romanian. I must have bought it in the late 70’s/ early 80’s when I was obsessed with Rimbaud, Artaud, Apollinaire and the French Surrealists. $2.50, probably at Garner & Smith Books on the Drag across from the HRC. I read it again today. It was just okay. The Approximate Man is still one of my favorite long poems. But First poems lack the magic of Tzara’s images in his later work.
Paul Celan—glottal stop, translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh
I finished re-reading glottal stop, 101 poems by Paul Celan this morning. I cannot say with any honesty that I understand the majority of the poems. At most I see a handful as a totality, and then hints and short glimpses inside the others. (Despite the thirty pages of notes at the end of the volume). I have been reading at Celan for years now. There is always something there that intrigues me and causes me to return again and again, reading multiple translations and volumes of his work over the decades. I first came in contact with him through his poem “Death Fugue.” A horrifying and tragic poem coming out of his experience in the Nazi death camps. A poem I understand he refuted later in his life. But then, how much control does an artist have over their work’s reception once it is released into the world? I will, no doubt, return to him again. He is worth the effort.
I have seen a couple of people post what they read this year. So, being the follower that I am, I decided to post my list. I read constantly, some books I have been reading for years, and have never finished, but am still reading off and on. Some books I stop reading for various reasons: I lose interest, I lose the book in the house somewhere, the book gets shelved, I get bored, I know where it is going, the writing is just too pathetic to continue. Here is the list of books I finished (from beginning to end) this year. I stress finished, because this is not a complete list of what I have been reading. The pictures are current book piles around the house I am reading from.
Fantasyland—Kurt Anderson
Bestiary—Guillaume Apollinaire
Educated—Tara Westover
The Historians (twice)—Eavan Boland
Poetry as Insurgent Art— Ferlinghetti
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
At the Existentialist Cafe—-Sarah Blakewell
An Indigenous People’s’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Under the Dome: walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive
Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson
The selected poems of Wendell Berry
Living Nations, Living Words edited and selected by Joy Harjo
An Unnecessary Woman—Rabid alameddine
Selected Poems of Guiseppe Ungaretti
Jimmy’s Blues by James Baldwin (selected poems)
How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Stone Lyre, poems by Rene Char
An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophocles, Euripides) translated by Anne Carson
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Finna by Nate Marshall (twice)
Debths by Susan Howe
Dark City by Charles Bernstein
The Essential Jim Harrison, by Jim Harrison
Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
The Big Seven by Jim Harrison
Goldenrod by Maggie Smith
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Glottal Stop by Paul Celan
Asylum by Jill Bialosky
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan
I started a serial poem back at the beginning of January. The plan was to write 140 poems, each poem’s length pre-determined by a random number generator, ranging from 3-140 syllables. It was to follow vaguely the rules of a renga, where each poem grew out of the one before it somehow, whether through theme, pun, image, or a reply. The number of poems was determined by the number of syllables in a sonnet.
I have reached 80 poems in this series. I hit 40 back at the end of March. I have 60 more to go. I would like to finish this by the end of December, which means I should speed up a bit. LOL. I have never really written under a deadline except for required essays in grad school. However, 80 poems in 7 months is a fairly phenomenal pace for me.
I will now begin to move forward with the third ‘stanza’ while collecting and tightening sections 1 and 2, in hopes that as I reread and work over the first two sections, the third stanza will continue the conversations, if you will, that began in the first two “stanzas,” and the themes and images will continue to echo and grow organically in section three.
A little obsessive, but then what about life is not.
I read this morning that Hemingway said that better writers didn’t talk about their writing; I think it is often important to reflect on what one is doing as one writes: metacognition to use education jabber. So, fuck off Ernie.
I started a serial poem back at the beginning of January. The plan was to write 140 poems, each poem’s length is pre-determined by a random number generator, ranging from 3-140 syllables. It was to follow vaguely the rules of a renga, where each poem grew out of the one before it somehow, weather through theme, pun, image, or a reply. The number of poems was determined by the number of syllables in a sonnet.
I have come to the end of the first “stanza” section—40 poems. The last poem in the section #40, ‘rhymes’ with (39), (20), and (1); as (10) and (30) ‘rhyme—in an attempt to create an overall section unity. I will now begin to move forward with the second ‘stanza’ while collecting and tightening section 1, in hopes that as I reread and work over section 1, the themes and ideas that emerged in section one will echo and grow organically in section two: a conversation between sections one and two, if you will, as section two talks to itself.
Well, it keeps me something to do, and think about if nothing else.
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